Insidious: Chapter 2 should coast to an easy victory this weekend, even though I haven’t been able to dig up any tracking (as of Thursday morning). There should be plenty of goodwill for this franchise, and the first version didn’t drop more than 30 percent until its fifth weekend. In fact, with worldwide grosses nearing $100 million, on a production budget of $1.5 million, they’ve got enough cash for the next 20 years of Insidious sequels. I’m calling for a solid bump and a $23.2 million weekendhere, something a little more than the first version’s opening two weekends.
Which brings us to The Family. If you’re counting up the “paycheck” roles for Robert De Niro since 2010 I think you get to the number five, counting this one, although this can’t be as bad as New Year’s Eve. Audiences rejected his last two R-rated features, The Big Wedding and Killing Season, so if you consider this an amalgamation of both it would be wise to predict trouble. I’m putting it at $11.2 million, and I really don’t know where the audience is going to come from. Do you dare go higher?
For our third prediction slot, we’ll take a look at Riddick‘s holdover number. The 2004 version fell over 60 percent during its sophomore weekend, so clearly a prodigious drop is coming. Still, last weekend’s winner has a far better RottenTomatoes percentage, plus the IMDB fan voters seem to appreciate it more as well. I’m still calling for a 58 percent dip, only a little better than the original, because it still feels like a front-loaded actioner to me. I can’t give it more than $8 million.
Last up? It’s high time we predicted Instructions Not Included! This only has 12 reviews, total, on RottenTomatoes, so clearly the mainstream media has completely missed it. Indeed, it only has 1,200 IMDB votes (Riddick has over 10,000), meaning even the average Internet film fan has no awareness of the film. And yet, it has made over $20 million at the box office. What gives? I’ll tell you, they (Lionsgate) went right after a market no one was making domestic films for, the Hispanic audience. Pretty clever, no? Additionally, as this one is clearly more dependent on word-of-mouth than traditional marketing, it will face much lesser dips each weekend. So I’m bullish on this “blue ocean” competitor (meaning: compete where no one else is), and predicting $6.1 million. How about you?
Another slow weekend at the box office, but plenty of interesting story-lines out there, get in there and mix it up!
Current Record: 12-34-2 against the wisdom of crowds.
Major Theater Chain (MTC) Tracking
- Insidious: Chapter 2: N/A
- The Family: N/A
SIDE NOTE: Some of the theater numbers below are estimates. We’ll have the actual counts in Sunday’s wrap-up article.
